Synopse Open Source

Since there was recently some articles about performance comparison between several versions of the Delphi compiler, we had to react, and gives our personal point of view.

IMHO there won't be any definitive statement about this.
I'm always doubtful about any conclusion which may be achieved with such kind of benchmarks.
Asking "which compiler is better?" is IMHO a wrong question.
As if there was some "compiler magic": the new compiler will be just like a new laundry detergent - it will be cleaner and whiter...

Performance is not about marketing.
Performance is an iterative process, always a matter of circumstances, and implementation.

Circumstances of the benchmark itself.
Each benchmark will report only information about the process it measured.
What you compare is a limited set of features, running most of the time an idealized and simplified pattern, which shares nothing with real-world process.

Implementation is what gives performance.
Changing a compiler will only gives you some percents of time change.
Identifying the true bottlenecks of an application via a profiler, then changing the implementation of the identified bottlenecks may give order of magnitudes of speed improvement.
For instance, multi-threading abilities can be achieved by following some simple rules.

With our huge set of regression tests, we have at hand more than 16,500,000 individual checks, covering low-level features (like numerical and text marshaling), or high-level process (like concurrent client/server and database multi-threaded process).

You will find here some benchmarks run with Delphi 6, 7, 2007, XE4 and XE6 under Win32, and XE4 and XE6 under Win64.
In short, all compilers performs more or less at the same speed.
Win64 is a little slower than Win32, and the fastest appears to be Delphi 7, using our enhanced and optimized RTL.

Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) codes are widely used for integrity checking of data in fields such as storage and networking.
There is an ever-increasing need for very high-speed CRC computations on processors for end-to-end integrity checks.

We just introduced to mORMot's core unit (SynCommons.pas) a fast and efficient crc32c() function.

It will use either:

• Optimized x86 asm code, with unrolled loops;
• SSE 4.2 hardware crc32 instruction, if available.

Resulting speed is very good.
This is for sure the fastest CRC function available in Delphi.
Note that there is a version dedicated to each Win32 and Win64 platform - both performs at the same speed!

In fact, most popular file formats and protocols (Ethernet, MPEG-2, ZIP, RAR, 7-Zip, GZip, and PNG) use the polynomial $04C11DB7, while Intel's hardware implementation is based on another polynomial, $1EDC6F41 (used in iSCSI and Btrfs).
So you would not use this new crc32c() function to replace the zlib's crc32() function, but as a convenient very fast hashing function at application level.
For instance, our TDynArray wrapper will use it for fast items hashing.

From the beginning, server-side storage tables which were not store in a SQLite3 database were implemented via some classes inheriting from TSQLRestServerStatic.
This TSQLRestServerStatic was inheriting from TSQLRestServer, which did not make much sense (but was made for laziness years ago, if I remember well).

Now, a new TSQLRestStorage class, directly inheriting from TSQLRest, is used for per-table storage.
This huge code refactoring results in a much cleaner design, and will enhance code maintainability.
Documentation has been updated to reflect the changes.

Note that this won't change anything when using the framework (but the new class names): it is an implementation detail, which had to be fixed.

Here are some benchmark charts about MongoDB integration in mORMot's ORM.

MongoDB appears as a serious competitor to SQL databases, with the potential benefit of horizontal scaling and installation/administration ease - performance is very high, and its document-based storage fits perfectly with mORMot's advanced ORM features like Shared nothing architecture (or sharding).

MongoDB (from "humongous") is a cross-platform document-oriented database system, and certainly the best known NoSQL database.
According to http://db-engines.com in April 2014, MongoDB is in 5th place of the most popular types of database management systems, and first place for NoSQL database management systems.
Our mORMot framework gives premium access to this database, featuring full NoSQL and Object-Document Mapping (ODM) abilities to the framework.

Integration is made at two levels:

• Direct low-level access to the MongoDB server, in the SynMongoDB.pas unit;
• Close integration with our ORM (which becomes defacto an ODM), in the mORMotMongoDB.pas unit.

MongoDB eschews the traditional table-based relational database structure in favor of JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas (MongoDB calls the format BSON), which matches perfectly mORMot's RESTful approach.

In this first article, we will detail direct low-level access to the MongoDB server, via the SynMongoDB.pas unit.

Mustache is a well-known logic-less template engine.
There is plenty of Open Source implementations around (including in JavaScript, which can be very convenient for AJAX applications on client side, for instance).
For mORMot, we created the first pure Delphi implementation of it, with a perfect integration with other bricks of the framework.

In this second part of this series of blog articles, we will introduce the Mustache syntax.
You can download this documentation as one single pdf file.

We have just released a set of slides introducing  ORM, SOA, REST, JSON, MVC, MVVM, SOLID, Mocks/Stubs, Domain-Driven Design concepts with Delphi,  and showing some sample code using our Open Source mORMot framework. You can follow the public link on Google Drive! This is a great opportunity to  […]

After more than 5 years of opening some huge part of Delphi code base, just my two cents.

Free software means free as a bird.

In practice, most Open Source "consumers" focus on free as a free beer...
This is a reality, especially for "niche" projects like developing libraries for Delphi.

Here are some thoughts from my little experiment with mORMot.
If you ask what Open Source for libraries mean, it may help you!

One year ago, we already made a quick presentation of Domain-Driven Design, in the context of our mORMot framework.
After one year of real-world application of those patterns, it is now time to give more light to DDD.

Let's continue with part 3, which will define Domain-Driven Design patterns and principles - this will be the main article of the whole serie!

One year ago, we already made a quick presentation of Domain-Driven Design, in the context of our mORMot framework.
After one year of real-world application of those patterns, and a training made by a great French software designer named Jérémie Grodziski, it is now time to give more light to DDD.

Let's start with part 1, which will be a general introduction to Domain-Driven Design, trying to state how it may be interesting (or not) for your projects.